How Departing Leaders Can Pass Along Their Wisdom to Employees

Executive Summary

Sometimes a creative act by one leader can inspire others. Ed Catmull, Pixar cofounder and long-time leader, did just that after announcing his retirement in late 2018. He chose to spend his last day on the company’s Emeryville campus not being celebrated by his colleagues but, instead, sharing thoughts about the challenges they would face in the years to come. First, Catmull provided Pixar employees with his well-informed perspective on the challenges ahead. Second, he gave them a launching point and maybe even the framework for future conversations, among themselves, about how Pixar will continue to thrive. And third, his talks honored how important this transition point was. In the history of a company, few moments are as pivotal as when a longtime leader departs. People can process the change better when it isn’t glossed over as nothing serious. While some CEOs might pop the champagne and let others sing their praises, you can go out differently. You can give the same gift Catmull gave to his teams to your own colleagues if you choose. You can share what you’ve learned.

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Earlier this spring I had the chance to witness two of the “farewell talks” that Ed Catmull gave to the people of Pixar. Catmull, the company’s cofounder and long-time leader (and also president of Disney Animation Studios since the Disney acquisition of Pixar over a decade ago) had announced his retirement in late 2018. He chose to spend his last day on Pixar’s Emeryville campus not being celebrated by his colleagues but, instead, sharing thoughts about the challenges they would face in the years to come.

Each “farewell talk” was a separate, hour-long session with a different team in the company, but the content wasn’t tailored to specific departments. Catmull shared — over and over again — what he believed the whole company should be thinking about as it looks ahead.

Catmull has always been unusually reflective about the challenges of leading creative organizations, and generous in sharing the practices he finds effective. In his 2014 book Creativity, Inc. (which he’s now updating with new learnings), for example, he shares useful insights and learnings aimed at helping other leaders succeed. In his farewell talks, he showed the same level of thoughtfulness. He decided to:

Make the sessions inclusive. It’s not uncommon for departing CEOs to have transitional talks with their top teams. But how many consider it important to talk with every team in the company? Catmull talked to everyone, including hundreds of people who had never sat in meetings focused on high-level strategic issues — but whose efforts make Pixar films possible. As a result, his parting act was immensely unifying.

Keep it intimate. With so many people to connect with, Catmull made the sensible decision to do many talks. Each talk, therefore, was intimate enough to create a conversational atmosphere. He acknowledged that, since his basic message was consistent, he could have simply addressed the company as whole. But as well as making it more meaningful for everyone, having smaller groups allowed him to sense his colleagues’ reactions. “My talks evolved,” he told me, “as I learned what people responded to.”

Pose questions rather than offer answers. Catmull started out drafting his talks around what he saw as Pixar’s “tentpole” issues — technology leadership, storytelling excellence, and more. But along the way, he found himself “reframing those tentpoles as questions.” I’ve seen this work well in other settings. It’s as simple as taking an issue like “changing consumer behavior” and converting it into a question: “What will motivate customers to buy our products five years from now?” Catmull made this issue-to-question switch because he knew it would be more engaging for his audience (“I found questions were much more memorable,” he says) and because his natural instinct is to show humility in the face of challenges. He didn’t want to proclaim solutions. He wanted to prompt his colleagues to think creatively about big strategic issues. He put vital questions on the table, “even if they couldn’t be readily answered.”

Create the space for people to air their own thoughts. One benefit of standing in front of your organization asking questions is that it models for everyone that framing the right questions is an important part of leadership. The best managers don’t figure out all the solutions and tell others how to execute them. They solve problems by drawing out their teams’ best thinking. Appropriately, Catmull left plenty of time at the end of his comments for his colleagues to speak up and pose questions of their own.

Display undiminished curiosity. Catmull ended each talk with a complete digression into territory he personally found fascinating. Having learned in his voracious reading about the condition of aphantasia, by which some people can’t visualize things in their mind’s eye, he had decided to do some research on his own, and invited any employees who were interested to take part in a survey about their experiences in visualizing. The effect was to finish the session not with a sad curtain call, but with the positive image of an ever-curious mind that will keep producing creative output. In fact, Catmull has told me since, “I was surprised to find that after I stepped down, I started too many projects without any break, to the point of exhaustion.” (Luckily, he was just then on his way to Hawaii for some rest and relaxation.)

So, why were these conversations valuable to the company? First, Catmull provided Pixar employees with his well-informed perspective on the challenges ahead. Second, he gave them a launching point and maybe even the framework for future conversations, among themselves, about how Pixar will continue to thrive. And third, the sessions honored how important this transition point was. In the history of a company, few moments are as pivotal as when a longtime leader departs. People can process the change better when it isn’t glossed over as nothing serious.

My point here is not to present leaders with a cookie-cutter approach to a farewell talk, but to urge them, when the time comes to make their exit, to be generous. While some CEOs might pop the champagne and let others sing their praises, you can go out differently.

When I asked Catmull, “Why doesn’t everyone do this?” he replied, “Most people feel they have to move on quickly. It isn’t common because it hasn’t occurred to them.”

Sometimes a creative act by one leader can put a new question on the table for others. Ed Catmull’s farewell talks did just that. The question is: How will you share your hard-earned wisdom at the end of a long career?